The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  Emil was genuinely surprised—not by Janos Crowder’s behavior, but by the Hanic estate. “You can do that? Pass your money on?”

  She leaned forward and put a cool hand on his hand, the one that held the notepad on his knee. “Dear, with money you can do anything.”

  “And you,” he began, hesitation stalling him. “You kicked him out?”

  “Like a White Guard,” she said, leaning back and flicking her fingers in a swatting motion. “Right out of my heart.”

  Irma arrived with two more drinks. He finished his first quickly—it chilled his teeth and made a cavity ache—and handed the empty glass back. Irma was silent and efficient and soon gone. Emil reached into his inside pocket. First, his fingers touched the garter, then moved on to the photographs. She looked interested as he handed them over.

  “Do you know these men?”

  “Sit over here.” She touched the sofa with her thin hand. “We’ll see.”

  He brought his drink with him and sat so he could look over her shoulder at the pictures, but it was awkward. His arm was in the way. So he stretched it over the back of the sofa, behind her head. She didn’t notice, or pretended not to. She went through the ten shots, the simple story of the meeting. He was surprised that she didn’t smell of liquor. She smelled fresh.

  “I want to apologize,” he said under his breath.

  “For what?” She was also whispering. Their proximity demanded it. Her eyes were very big, their brown speckled details clear.

  “Your father, first of all. I didn’t know about him.”

  “We don’t mourn the rich,” she said, and he couldn’t find the sarcasm that should have been in her voice. “Second of all?”

  “The phone call. I told our people not to call you; I’d wanted to deliver the news in person. They’re a bunch of fools.”

  “But you’re not, are you?”

  She had said this softly, her eyes very serious, and he couldn’t answer.

  “It’s all right,” she shrugged, and he finally caught a whiff of the morning’s scotch. “Though they were surprisingly rude about it.”

  “Rude?”

  “Abrupt. The man said, This is the Militia. Your husband’s been killed; we’ll be there soon. That was it. I thought it was a joke. This is the level of humor in the country now. But then I was sure someone was watching me. You know the feeling. Eyes in the windows. It was frightening. It made me think of my uncles—my father’s brothers. They were shot in Vienna in ‘forty-two. Executed in the street. They were rich too, all the brothers were. But that didn’t save them.” She frowned and shook her head. “At first I was scared, but by the time you arrived I was just angry.” A pause. “I’m sorry about that.”

  He was filled with a sudden, hard hatred for the entirety of the police division, the People’s Militia, the state.

  “You’re all right?”

  “What about the pictures?”

  She pointed at the taller of the two men. “I don’t know him, but this one, the shorter one,” she said, shifting her manicured finger. “He’s a friend of Janos. Was!’ She brought the finger to her lower lip, tapping. “Well, I don’t know about friend. Acquaintance. They met when we went to his house for a dinner party. Hateful stuff,” she said. “Those people are all bravado and asskissing. They both spoke Hungarian, I remember, Janos and him, so they got along. A políticos, that’s what he was. An untouchable in a society built on equality. Nice!’ She smiled, and her finger— he was watching it closely—came away from her lips damp. “What’s his name? Jerzy. Yes. Jerzy Michalec. Lives not too far away, a few miles farther west. Did you know he was Smerdyakov?”

  He thought he hadn’t heard her right. “Smerdyakov? The war hero?”

  “I’d never met a hero in my life,” she said. “Janos told me. Michalec doesn’t advertise it. A políticos likes to be quiet, not raise too many heads on his way to the top. He’ll only use his nom de guerre when he needs it.”

  He opened his mouth, not knowing what to say. The man was almost a figment of his imagination by now. He hardly believed he existed. Now he was celluloid in a dead man’s apartment.

  She was looking at him, and when she spoke all levity had disappeared. “I wasn’t just thinking about my father today, Inspector. I was thinking about you.”

  He started to say Me? but didn’t.

  “I’ve lost two men, and I’ve never been without one. And when I look around at all the men I know, there’s only one I can see clearly. It’s funny, I don’t understand it. There’s only one man I want to trust.” Their foreheads almost touched, and her face emanated warmth. “Are you sure,” she whispered, “you don’t want a bath?”

  He did. He wanted that bath more than anything in his life. A bath and a thick, fresh towel on the upper floors of this magnificent house. He wanted her most of all. He didn’t know what to make of Lena Crowder, if he should be ashamed of his desire for this widow or this unexpected desire for him. No—he knew. He should feel shame and self-hatred—she was weakened now by all her losses, and he was just an animal—but he only felt the pleasure of her coarse, broken life beside his.

  “I’d like to,” he began, then pursed his lips and shook his head, trying still to convince himself. “Another time.”

  “Maybe there won’t be another time.” She smiled and touched his cheek with her cool fingertips.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  *******************

  He was feeling unofficial, unkept. He didn’t want to fill out paperwork that would be tossed aside by that lumbering fool of a chief, and he didn’t want to put up with the station’s leers at his intoxication, or Terzian’s indifference. Instead, he drove across the Georgian Bridge and parked in the small gravel lot at the edge of the Canal District. He pulled the brake and rolled down the window. There were two other cars—eastern models coated with the dust of the provinces—and a farmer tying feedbags to five horses and talking loudly to them. He noticed Emil, tied the last bag, and wandered over an arched, stone bridge into the labyrinth.

  Emil brought his hand to his face and rubbed, thinking of Lena Crowder’s lighter-than-air gowns and Jerzy Michalec: Smerdyakov: the Butcher. Grandfather’s vision of the perfect grandson.

  It was hot. Gravel crunched beneath his shoes.

  The buildings ahead were piled upon one another, centuries covering swamp gasses and filth. Not even fire trucks could attack the tiny, winding footpaths of this city in miniature, and when fires sprang up, sparks shot across the narrow canals and slowly ate the Canal District. It was only a matter of time before heat and decay wiped out all of it.

  He crossed the arched bridge and glanced up at high, curtained windows and mossy stone walls. He emerged onto small squares where children shared cigarettes and threw yellow wooden balls against the buildings, the thump echoing down the footpaths. Some squares were wide, dominated by flat-faced, cracked churches where old women in black congregated and chatted among themselves. He smelled piss. This was the unso- cialized part of the Capital, where each corner hid some illicit entrepreneur or a moment of spiritual reverie. He saw a grandmother on her knees, praying to a hole in a stucco wall that held a rough, childlike portrait of the Virgin.

  He could still hear the thump, streets back, of wooden balls, and the lapping of water on stone. The wet air was very cool in the shadows. The narrow walkways could not accommodate anything except a noontime sun, and it was still only morning. It was what he imagined Venice to be like, as the Croat had described it before he tumbled overboard, drunk, to his Arctic death. He had been a refugee from Split and, after crossing the Adriatic, had hidden in a friend of a friend’s wet Venetian palazzo. He called the city a stone angel and described in awed, exaggerated detail the porticoes and canals and piazzas and arched footbridges. He held his hands close together to show the narrowness of the passageways. Everyone in that small, cramped cabin nodded.

  The Bulgarian had already stormed out; he didn’t believe a word. The Croat, he said, loved t
o be the center of attention and would make up anything. Who could walk through a passage like that? It was true, but no one else cared.

  Arched bridges? Emil had asked, thinking of this place in his own country.

  They were all sweating from the heat of the boiler room next door, and there were too many of them, sprawled on the floor and the table, the wind hissing over the deck above them.

  The Croat described the walk from his friend’s palazzo to a canal that was overlooked, high up, by a covered bridge that connected two stone walls. The doomed, he told them. They crossedhere on the way to the prisons. They call it the Bridge of Sighs. The Arab asked why. Because the prisoner had been convicted, and this was where he saw that, at the end of that short walk across the bridge, his life would be lived behind a stone wall. Behind iron bars. He would live and die in the dark.

  A bleak silence fell over the cabin. No one spoke. Each man remembered his own bridge, but Emil, still so young, only knew he was missing the power of the moment, and said nothing.

  At one corner a thin man offered black-market socks-”Good price, good price.” Emil took a swig of the barmaid’s rotgut brandy, adding to Lena Crowder s morning cocktail, and shook his head. He thought of Smerdyakov, the happy butcher, piling up dead Germans for his own private gallery in a bombed-out Berlin. Was that really the kind of boy Grandfather wanted?

  But a butcher, remembered Emil, was just what he was.

  Cold water dripped on his ear. Above, a mother hung lines of heavy laundry between the buildings. The ground was covered by black spots. He crossed another bridge.

  Jerzy Michalec, a políticos. But he was also known as Smerdyakov, the Butcher. Grandfather called it courage, but Emil wasn’t sure that courage was the right word for butchery.

  There were two benches in the square, one with only a single, uneven plank, the second with all three. Emil settled on the good one and propped the bottle on his thigh. Ahead, where the walls opened onto a larger canal, a group of pensioners lounged on the bridge, eating pumpkin seeds and pointing at trash floating in the water, just like children.

  There had been an editorial in The Spark last month calling for the demolition of the Canal District. The writer claimed—and not without evidence—that it was a breeding ground for crime and disease, and any attempt to repair its crumbling infrastructure of water pipes and collapsing walls would bankrupt the nation. It would be the symbolic extension of the Liberation:Wipe away the wormy, decayed past, and build up the future. The writer predicted high block apartments checkered atop the wet, fractured foundations, the swamp drained and its water managed into small brooks running water wheels to light the city. He had been to Moscow, he said, and had seen what great heights unity and resolve could achieve. Later, the rumors swept through the Capital more quickly than The Spark: The Comrade Chairman himself wanted to funnel funds into the city s coffers to put the idea into action. Under the condition, the rumor added, that it be called New Stalingrad.

  The pensioners had moved on and been replaced by three prostitutes. Two heavy matriarchs and a young, pretty girl. All three looked at him, then began talking among themselves.

  It was true, the Canal District was a cesspool. Here Emil had come when he was a boy, with friends, sneaking into the dark passages where they could disappear. It was here he had first sowed his dreams of leaving the country. They were planted here, and had bloomed through the Soviet window of moving pictures in the provinces. The Canal District had that effect on him, on most people, and if anything was to blame for him boarding that train headed toward the icy north, it was this swamp-born city within the city.

  He took another long, burning swig.

  In the Arctic, the Bulgarian refused to lose at cards.

  He swallowed.

  They were stuffed in the hull of the boat—ten men in a cabin built for three, choked with smoke and sweat—and when Emil showed his winning kalookie hand to the limp-cheeked Bulgarian, the shouts almost shattered the walls. The big man pushed the money over with a look of hatred.

  Smerdyakov was a war hero. Grandfather called him the greatest ever, a testament to the nation. Emil had never known war. Not the war of armies and soldiering.

  The Bulgarian followed him afterward, pestering with his blunt, hard hands, grabbing him by his shoulders and shaking. He followed Emil across the icy deck, using Bulgarian curses no one could understand, and swung fists. Emil left with bruises and a bloody nose. The next night was no better, nor the next, and finally Emil just bolted when he saw the Bulgarian approach. In his cot each night he fingered the curved work blade he held beneath the blankets.

  The pretty whore balanced on the single board spanning the bad bench. It wobbled beneath her, and she smiled at him, amused. He nodded an invitation toward the- corner of his own bench. He knew what he was doing; any man who had grown up in the Capital knew. But all he wanted now was her physical presence, her proximity. When she settled down, the violet folds of her skirt collected behind the bend of her knee. Her lipstick and rouge were bright and fresh. But in his head he saw the Bulgarian with the baggy cheeks who attacked him that fourth night on the cold deck.

  “You’re very handsome,” she said quietly, near his cheek, her breath warm.

  The other hookers, the veterans with rough cheeks and black eyes, watched from the water’s edge. One stood with her hands on the small of her back, as if stretching after washing clothes.

  The Bulgarian had stood like that when he caught sight of Emil. Then he leapt.

  “You’d like to go somewhere, love? I know an alley.”

  She was very young, he now saw, her soft red lips muddied around the edges, her eyes very big. Her accent was definitely out- of-town, and from the way she crossed her legs and moved with a stuttering motion closer to him, he could tell this was new to her. She was maybe thirteen. There was a fine coating of freckles the white powder on her cheeks did not cover.

  Eat this, the Bulgarian had said, using their shared Russian, throwing a drunken fist at Emil’s teeth. A mouthful of Bulgarian knuckles.

  “Where are you from?” he asked the girl.

  “From here.” She spoke as though she hadn’t heard the question. “The alley’s very close. It’s very cheap.” Then, as an afterthought: “Because I like you.”

  Cheater, the sagging cheeks had said. His knees held down Emil’s arms, and he bounced on Emil’s belly. The deck was cold and ice-dry against the back of his head. The fear turned his blood to sand.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Livia,” she lied.

  He touched her fine, child’s hair. “Do you like this? Your work.” He didn’t know what he was saying.

  “I like to make money.” She smiled. He caught sight of her teeth, rounded and small, a few missing. Milk teeth. The teeth of a five-year-old in a teenager. “And this way—who doesn’t like it? It’s what people like.”

  This is the way, the Bulgarian had said when he pulled a fat, purple cock out of his pants. Emil’s pinned hand had found the curved blade in his pocket.

  The older hookers were leaning from foot to foot, impatient, watching every move he made. He should have called one of them over; there would have been no worries, no nagging conscience, nor that claustrophobic sense that all eyes were on him.

  The thick pants slowed it, but the blade broke through. It glided into the Bulgarian’s thigh, struck a vein, and when he removed it, the warm, black fountain began to flow. He pushed the blade in again. The Bulgarian said Uhh and fell back, holding himself.

  The girl smelled of rosewater; she had been prepared. This must be her first time.

  Jerzy Michalec, Smerdyakov. A hero. And Emil Brod, a murderer leaning over a child.

  He had squeezed out from under the baying Bulgarian, then went about it with the efficiency of his craft. His seals blade found quick ways to silence the squeals, his movements by now instinct—a seal-butcher s instincts. And only when the job was done and he leaned on the railing, gasp
ing, his blind fever passing, did he think to push the carcass over the edge onto the ice below. He watched it drop silently beneath the wind, and felt as if he were standing on a bridge, watching everything end.

  He sighed and, with closed eyes, leaned toward the girl, breathing in her fresh scent. She turned to accept a kiss, but he whispered, “I’m a policeman.”

  He heard her feet move, the boards shifting as she rose. The quick jogging across cobblestones. Voices. When he opened his eyes finally, the square was empty and silent, save the sound of dirty water lapping on stone walls.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  *******************

  Jerzy Michalec’s address was even further out of town than

  Lena Crowder’s. When Emil turned down the long, poplar- lined drive, he couldn’t see the house. Then, from behind a grassy rise, there was a bearded peasant swinging a scythe a few inches above the earth. Then the house. It spread wide and high, a long porch wrapping around half of it. Another swig of brandy steadied him and held his headache at bay. It was one.

  The young man with a wide green tie who opened the door was the second butler Emil had met in his life. The first had been at the home of the Academy director, who invited all the graduating cadets to a celebration of their entrance into the world. That butler had been reserved yet always smiling; this one was reserved and disdainful. He made no effort to conceal his instant distaste for Emil’s stench as he gazed down on him—a trick, since he was shorter than Emil.

  “Comrade Michalec,” said Emil, tense. “Tell him a homicide inspector from the People’s Militia is here to see him.”

  “He’s expecting you?”

  “No.”

  The butler shut the door in his face.